Dr. El Saadawi is an Egyptian feminist activist and a psychiatrist who originally published this book in Arabic in 1977. She has had a tumultuous relationship with the Egyptian government and was imprisoned after criticizing former President Anwar Sadat. During her career she worked at several universities in the United States. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World has seamlessly incorporated elements of memoir and critical analysis of Arab culture and Islam. El Saadawi divides the book into four sections: The Mutilated Half, Women in History, The Arab Woman, and Breaking Through. The book opens with Dr. El Saadawi recounting in the first-person her harrowing experience with female genital mutilation (a very common practice in her home country of Egypt) when she was 6 years old. She uses very descriptive, perhaps even graphic language, to describe the experience in all its horror. This early childhood memory sets the stage for the audience to bear witness to all the various types of misogyny that many Egyptian and Arab women inevitably experience.

Dr. El Saadawi then skillfully relates memories of being told, for example, to not ask too many questions because she was a girl, and states that she has never heard the word “bint” (Arabic word for girl) used in a positive fashion. These nuggets of personal experiences are inserted into an overview of the complaints of stifled sexuality and associated sequelae with which her psychiatric patients struggled. She delves into the topics of Islam’s take on non-marital sex, illegitimate children, and prostitution thrown against the backdrop of her personal experiences seeing young, poor girls who work as maids being raped and impregnated by the men of the families who employ them and then being held as the sole accountable party.

After the first section, Dr. El Saadawi broadens her focus to include the status of women starting with Eve (whom the major monotheistic religions, including Islam, believe to be the first woman on Earth). Dr. El Saadawi investigates the historical designation of women as inferior in the Jewish faith and explains that as Christianity and Islam evolved against this backdrop, they also assigned women to a similar status. She insightfully points out how femininity did not evolve independently of society but rather that femininity and a woman’s place in society (all societies) are direct reflections of socioeconomic practices or goals of that society.

Evan Hansen, an awkward, lonely high school senior, struggles
with Social Anxiety Disorder. On the
advice of his therapist, he pens supportive letters to himself:
“Dear Evan Hansen, Today is going to be an amazing day, and
here’s why. Because today all you have
to do is be yourself. But also
confident.”

Connor, another loner student, picks up one of Evan’s
letters and, several days later, commits suicide. When Connor’s parents find the letter, they take
it to be their son’s suicide note. Instead
of dissuading them, Evan concocts an account of a close friendship with the
classmate he barely knew, creating an email trail. Connor’s family swallows the
story.

As Evan gains the attention he has always craved and comes
out of his shell, he finds that he cannot stop himself. He
founds the “Connor Project,” an organization dedicated to preserving his “friend’s”
memory where he shares his musings on social media: “Have you ever felt like nobody was
there? Have you ever felt forgotten in
the middle of nowhere? Have you ever
felt like you could disappear? Like you
could fall, and no one would hear? ...Well, let that lonely feeling wash
away…Lift your head and look around. You
will be found. You will be found.” Once Evan’s postings go viral, the Connor
Project becomes a veritable industry, with a budget, and fans who look to it
for inspiration. As the stakes rise, the
Project can flourish only by being fed more lies.

This is an autobiographical work that describes the remarkable life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The book begins in Somalia, where Hirsi Ali was born and spent the early part of her childhood. It is here that Hirsi Ali discusses the second-class status of girls and the harrowing practice of female genital cutting, which she describes as it happened to her and her younger sister. Although her parents were against the practice, Hirsi Ali undergoes female genital cutting by the arrangement of her maternal grandmother, who states that if the clitoris is not cut, it will grow and end up dangling between the knees of the girl. This situation speaks to the variety of immediate reasons why different cultures engage in female genital cutting. They all revolve, however, around the disempowerment of girls and women and denying their basic human right to bodily integrity and sexuality.

Due to civil unrest, Hirsi Ali and her family move around quite a bit while she is growing up, in places as distant as Saudi Arabia (where Hirsi Ali describes her childhood horror at seeing women clad in all black from head to toe), Ethiopia, and Kenya. Throughout her travels as a child and then a teenager, Hirsi Ali vacillates between being a staunch believer in Islam to questioning her faith, all while experiencing emotional, verbal, and savage physical abuse at the hands of her mother and, at one point, her Qur’an teacher.

The action quickens at an incredible pace when Hirsi Ali’s father and community arrange for her to marry a Somali man who lives in Canada, even though Hirsi Ali does not consent to the marriage. It is telling when, on the day of her wedding ceremony, Hirsi Ali has a normal day at home while her father, her new husband, and the other men in her community have a celebration without her. In the Islamic ceremony, the bride only needs to be represented by a male guardian (father, brother, uncle, grandfather, etc) and does not physically need to be present. Hirsi Ali’s husband goes back to Canada and sends for her to join him. Rather than meeting her husband in Canada, Hirsi Ali manages to make her way to Amsterdam and apply for asylum. It is here that the reader watches Hirsi Ali confront a great amount of cognitive dissonance between what her Islamic upbringing has taught her about right and wrong versus what she personally experiences in the Netherlands,

“The next morning, I decided to stage an experiment. I would walk out of the door without a headscarf. I was in my long green skirt and a long tunic, and I had my scarf in a bag with me in case of trouble, but I would not cover my hair. I planned to see what would happen...Absolutely nothing happened. The gardeners kept trimming the hedges. Nobody went into a fit...Nobody looked at me. If anything, I attracted less attention than when I was covering my head. Not one man went into a frenzy” (p. 195).

Hirsi Ali is forthcoming about having lied on her asylum application to make her more likely to be approved. In the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali works as a Somali interpreter and, against all odds, goes on to attend college and obtain a degree in political science. While all of this is happening, Hirsi Ali is repeatedly impressed by Dutch society in their social order and equality between the sexes. She sees a glaring contrast between Dutch society and the lives of immigrant and refugee communities in the Netherlands. The Dutch, in an effort to be tolerant of immigrants and engage in multiculturalism, allowed Islamic religious schools to be established. Hirsi Ali, however, sees this as a way to sanction the systematic oppression of women in a democratic country.

Hirsi Ali becomes politically active and becomes elected to the Dutch Parliament where she rails against this Dutch practice of allowing old-world religious edicts to coexist in a democratic land. As part of her fight against the sanctioning of hard-line Islam, Hirsi Ali writes a short film entitled Submission (which is the translation of the Arabic word “Islam”) that is produced by filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. The film speaks directly to the oppression of women in Islam. At what is the climax of an already exciting book, Van Gogh is killed by a Muslim man who is clearly insulted by the film. Now, a publicly recognizable figure, Hirsi Ali’s life is in grave and immediate danger, and the Dutch parliament moves her from secure location to secure location (at one point, even as far as Boston) to protect her life. She is temporarily stripped of her Dutch citizenship on the basis of having lied on her asylum application, which effectively ends her political career in the Netherlands. Hirsi Ali then re-locates to the United States.

The speaker of this poem is a nurse who is recalling and
attempting to come to terms with a disturbing clinical encounter she’d had the
week before. (I should note at the
outset that there’s no indication in the poem as to whether the nurse is male
or female. I choose to think of her as
female). What had happened is that a
mother had brought her five-year-old son in for treatment, and the nurse’s exam
revealed that the child had second- and third-degree burns on his torso—in the
shape of a cross. The mother, weeping,
confessed that her boyfriend had, as a punishment, applied a cigarette to the
child’s body—while the mother had held her son.
Seeing the mother’s tears, the nurse considered offering the woman some
Kleenex, but could not bring herself to do so.
The child retrieved the box of Kleenex, then clung to his mother’s
skirt, and glowered at the nurse. Then
the nurse had participated with three others in prying the boy away from his
mother. In the present of the poem, a
week after the encounter, the nurse attempts to deal with the guilt and shame
she feels in her failure of professional decorum and compassion—at having
failed to rise above her moral judgment against the mother and offer the woman
basic human kindness and respect. In
confronting the chaos of her emotions, the nurse turns to a story she’d learned
in high school: the story of St. Lawrence.
The significance of her attempt to think with this story can be
overshadowed, for readers, by the intensity of the clinical encounter she
recalls; but her endeavor is of at least equal significance as the encounter.

This is a novel set in Lagos, Nigeria among a polygamous peoples and follows the formative years of protagonist Ibo Aku-nna as she experiences the death of her father, the horror of starting menstruation, and falling in love with her teacher, Chike, of whom the elders in her family do not approve because he comes from a family that was previously enslaved.

Throughout the novel, the reader is introduced to several traditions, which speak to how women are valued less than men in this setting. For instance, when Aku-nna’s father dies, her mother must go through a special procedure for mourning, described here:

“Ma Blackie was to remain alone in the special hut; not until the months of mourning were over could she visit people in their homes. She must never have a bath. No pair of scissors nor comb must touch her hair. She must wear continually the same old smoked rags” (p. 71).

Another tradition is the concept of the bride price, which is the sum of money paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s family in exchange for her hand in marriage. The more valuable a daughter is (whether in appearance or family status), the higher the bride price. Further, if a girl’s bride price is not paid, it was the belief that the bride would die during childbirth.

When Aku-nna is sixteen, she finishes her schooling and learns that she has passed an examination that qualifies her to be a schoolteacher. At the same time, a youth with a limp in her village, named Okoboshi, sets his sights on her to become his wife. His family then kidnaps Aku-nna. When a bride is kidnapped, her bride price does not apply, and it does not have to be paid. Also, if a man cuts away a lock from a girl's hair, she becomes his wife and he, again, is not responsible for paying the bride price:

“Some youth who had no money to pay for a bride might sneak out of the bush to cut a curl from a girl’s head so that she would belong to him for life and never been able to return to her parents: because he had given her the everlasting haircut, he would be able to treat her as he liked, and no other man would ever touch her. It was to safeguard themselves against this that many girls cropped their hair very close; those who wanted long hair wore a headscarf most of the time” (p. 103).

When Okoboshi tries to have sex with Aku-nna, she refuses and says that it is because she has already lost her virginity to Chike, even though she really had not. In disgust, Okoboshi stops trying to have sex with Aku-nna and beats her savagely, vowing to keep her as his wife in name only but then marry other women, whom Aku-nna would have to serve. Through initiative and luck, Aku-nna escapes from Okoboshi’s house and elopes with Chike. Despite how much money Chike’s family tries to pay Aku-nna’s family as her bride price, they will not accept it.

Meanwhile, Aku-nna finds work as a school teacher and Chike is also successful at his work. They are very happy together for a time, and Aku-nna becomes pregnant. She struggles very much with her pregnancy and becomes quite weak as a result. One night, Aku-nna becomes sick and is admitted to the hospital, where the doctor informs her and Chike that she must undergo a Cesarean section and have her baby prematurely. A baby girl is born healthy, but Aku-nna perishes due to extreme anemia, according to her doctor. Thus, the novel ends in confirmation of the superstition that if a girl’s bride price is not paid, she will die in childbirth.

The Renewal of Generosity:
Illness, Medicine, and How to Live contemplates the phenomenon of
generosity as it is realized in the stories of physicians and patients. For Arthur Frank, generosity is grounded in
the willingness of people to give themselves over to dialogical processes of
communication wherein participants best realize themselves through relational
engagement: generous, dialogical communication leads to a renewal and
realization of human being. Health
care systems today tend to impede communicative generosity, however, and the
result is a de-humanization and de-moralization of both physicians and
patients. As a remedy, Frank proposes,
first, that we re-figure our conceptualization of the physician-patient
relationship—from the economic or business metaphor of “provider” and “client,”
we should turn to the metaphorical conceptualization of “host” and “guest,”
which clearly has implications for manner of treatment and communication that
occurs in the relationship. In addition,
Frank turns to and thinks with stories of physicians and stories of the ill to
reflect on the ways that generosity is realized. Drawing on the wisdom of the striking
philosophical triumvirate of Marcus Aurelius (Stoicism), Mikhail Bakhtin
(Dialogism), and Emmanuel Levinas to amplify the reflections
emerging from the physician and patient stories, Frank ultimately proposes
“exercises” for training to generate a vivifying generosity within the medical
profession, which can in turn lead to a re-humanization and re-moralization for
physicians, improved care for patients, and enhanced flourishing for all.

Andrew Schulman is a New York
guitarist with a long history of playing in hotels, restaurants, small groups,
and formal concerts—even in Carnegie Hall, the White House, and Royal Albert
Hall. His memoir describes his experience as a patient in a Surgical Intensive
Care Unit (SICU), where he was briefly clinically dead. Six months later he
began a part-time career as a guitarist playing for patients and staff in that
very same SICU.

In July of 2009, Schulman underwent
surgery for a pancreatic tumor (luckily benign) but crashed afterward. He
suffered cardiac arrest and shortage of blood to his brain for 17 minutes.
Doctors induced a week-long medical coma, but his condition worsened. His wife
asked if he could hear music; he had brought a prepared iPod. When the opening
chorus of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion played in his earbud, the computer monitor
showed that his vital signs stabilized, and he survived. The nurses called it a
miracle.

Convinced of music’s healing power,
Schulman proposed that he return and play for patients and staff. He describes various
patients for whom he played over the next six years (with permission or changes
of name and details). He explains his approach to choosing music, pacing it, and
feeling hunches for what is right for a given patient. He interviews experts
and reads scientific papers in order to explain how the brain processes music. Music
reminds patients of their earlier, healthier lives; it coordinates right and left
brain; it brings calmness and peace.

Imaging studies show that music (and
emotionally charged literature) stimulate the brain regions associated with
reward—similar to euphoria, sex, and use of addictive drugs.

Schulman knew some 300 pieces from a
wide range of music, but his illness damaged his memory so that he could
recall only six of them. That meant his work relied on sheet music. Near the
end of the book, however, his “rehab” of playing three times a week, concentrating
on the music, and intending to help others—all this allowed his brain to heal, and
he began to memorize as before. Schulman consults with experts and undergoes
two brain scans and other studies that show the neuroplasticity of this brain
that allowed it to rewire and memorize once again.

Although Music Therapy is discussed
as an allied profession, Schulman is considered, rather, as a “medical musician” playing only in the SICU. Provision
of music, whether by Music Therapist or “medical musician,” is,
however, usually not covered by insurance and therefore not available to
patients.

There’s a six-page Afterword by Dr.
Marvin A. McMillen, who Schulman describes as “central” to his survival. McMillen
writes that being both a critical care doctor and a critical care patient himself
(polycystic kidney disease), he knows the importance of emotional support to
patients, healing environments, and the power of music. McMillen was also pivotal
in allowing Schulman to play in the SICU.

First published in 1898, Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” has been ably adapted as a short play by
physician-playwright, Guy Fredrick Glass. In addition to the original
characters, in his adaptation Glass has added a new character, a medical
student, Boris, as a foil and interlocutor for the work’s main character, Dr.
Korolyov. Staging directions and scene setting also add dramatic dimensions to
the story, as do elaborations of conversations including comedic encounters with the governess, Christina Dmitryevna, and a display of "compassionate solidarity" (see Coulehan annotation ) with the
doctor’s patient, Liza. The primary theme of the story stays true in this
adaptation—Korolyov’s impressions of the patient viewed from a cold objective
stance are changed as he develops personal insights into the social and
political nature of her (and his) malaise.

Suzanne
O’Sullivan is a neurologist in the British National Health Service. She has a
particular interest in psychosomatic illnesses, and in this book, she covers
what she has learned about them. O’Sullivan provides these learnings mostly
from clinical experience rather than as findings from empiric studies on
psychosomatic illnesses.

Each
chapter is built around one or more case studies that focus on particular
psychosomatic illnesses, and include historical perspectives and various
theories that might explain why they occur.
The
cases O’Sullivan uses presented themselves as seizures, paralysis, urinary
tract troubles, generalized and localized pain, gastrointestinal problems,
fatigue, blindness, and dystonia. Patients sometimes came to her with pre-determined
diagnoses such as epilepsy, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic
encephalomyelitis, and fibromyalgia among others. O’Sullivan is emphatic that
psychosomatic illnesses are not just any presentation of illness that cannot be
linked to a pathological basis. Psychosomatic illnesses arise from “the
subconscious mind [that] reproduces symptoms that make sense to the individual’s
understanding of how a disease behaves.” (p. 83) Illness presentations that are
feigned or self-inflicted (e.g., Munchausen’s syndrome) are not psychosomatic
illnesses in O’Sullivan’s view.Each chapter delves into some particular
aspect of psychosomatic illness relevant to the case study. These include
history (e.g., role of the uterus in hysteria), mechanisms at work (e.g.,
conversion reactions, dissociation), triggers (e.g., stress, loss, personality
traits), factors (e.g., previous illness experiences), illness behavior
disorders (e.g., associating illness to benign physical sensations), and the
higher incidence seen among females. Though O’Sullivan teases out various
characteristics and workings of psychosomatic illnesses, she admits that they
remain vexing to clinicians because, “almost any function of the body can be
affected in almost any way.” (p. 170)

Wandering in Darkness is an intricate
philosophical defense for the problem of suffering as it is presented by
medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas.The work addresses the philosophical / theological
problem of evil, which might be expressed as follows: if one posits an all-good, all-powerful God
as creator, yet suffering exists in the world, then (a) God must be evil, since
he created it; (b) God is less than all-powerful, since suffering came to be in
his creation, and he could not stop it; (c) God is evil and weak, since
suffering came to be in his creation, and he did not want to stop it; or (d)
suffering is an illusion. No alternative
is, of course, very satisfying. In her book, Eleanore Stump augments Thomas
Aquinas’s theodicy by reflecting upon what she calls “the desires of the
heart,” a dimension of human experience that Aquinas leaves largely untreated
in his consideration. Stump explores
this dimension by breathtaking exegeses of Biblical narratives as narratives: the stories of Job,
Samson, Abraham, and Mary of Bethany.
“Understood in the contexts of [these] narratives,” Stump argues,
“Aquinas’s theodicy explains in a consistent and cogent way why God would allow
suffering" (22).